Senior Ground Segment Software Engineer – Spacecraft Ops

Frontdoor Defense; El Segundo, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 169,000 - 216,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Long-term cash awards

Job summary

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, California seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software for spacecraft operations. You will work across telemetry, commanding, data distribution, and mission control interfaces, integrating flight software with avionics and RF/ground systems.

The role emphasizes real-time, low-latency services, CI/CD pipelines, and scalable deployment across lab, test range, and mission networks, with opportunities to build self-service tooling

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent technical experience in safety critical software.
• 5+ years of experience in the development of spacecraft or similar safety critical software.
• Expertise with development in Python, along with a strong understanding of the language concepts.
• Have strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, networking, performance, reliability.
• Experience building real-time data acquisition, scaling, and distribution services - low-latency messaging, time-series and relational stores.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, dependency/build systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
• End-to-end observability experience: logging, metrics, tracing.
• Docker/Kubernetes; release management, phased rollouts, and operational readiness for controlled networks.

Responsibilities

• Own Ground Segment Services: Develop and maintain high-reliability services for telemetry ingestion, scaling, distribution, and commanding. Ensure deterministic behavior for real-time operations and post-flight analysis.
• Mission Control Interfaces: Deliver operator-grade UIs and dashboards that optimize 'ops time' and reduce cognitive load across integration, test, and on-orbit operations phases.
• Simulation and Test Automation: Build tools to run flight-software simulations, device emulators, and scenario-based automated tests - enabling fast, safe iteration for avionics, GNC, and operations teams.
• Build the Mission Platform: Design, implement, and productionize software for mission and ground software teams. Standardize CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, service templates, infrastructure-as-code, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop frameworks, test harnesses, and observability - all delivered as self-service tooling.
• Deployments Across Environments: Create robust deployment patterns for lab benches, test stands, and mission networks. Implement safe rollout/rollback strategies and air-gapped or limited-connectivity deployment approaches.

Skills

Python

Concurrency

Networking

Real-time systems

Docker/Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, math, physics, engineering or equivalent

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Ansible

NiceGUI

CI/CD tools

Job description

Varda Space Industries in El Segundo, California seeks a Senior Mission Software Engineer to own the ground segment software for spacecraft operations. You will work across telemetry, commanding, data distribution, and mission control interfaces, integrating flight software with avionics and RF/ground systems.

The role emphasizes real-time, low-latency services, CI/CD pipelines, and scalable deployment across lab, test range, and mission networks, with opportunities to build self-service tooling